On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Nik Frengle wrote:
> Curt, I
> won't say what my docomo mail is, but it is not anything Japanese. If you
> think about it, there are forty six sounds in kana. If you had a
> two-syllable combination, it would only take 2116 tries to hit the right
> one. If it were three syllables, it would go up to 4,477,456, still not a
> huge number.
Right. I mentioned this about a month ago on this list, I believe,
along with a bunch of other techniques that spammers are going to use
to try to find valid e-mail addresses.
I'm not too worried about how easy the address is to guess because
I expect that regardless I'm eventually going to have to switch to
blocking all mail except that relayed via keitai@cynic.net. (I think
I've mentioned here before the details of how this works.) It's still
security through obscurity, but at a level where it's not going to be
worth what a spammer would have to invest to get around it. I haven't
done this yet only because I wanted to see how much spam I get with a
non-phone-number address.
Interestingly enough, four days later I've not gotten a single spam since
that first one, so it must have been some sort of weird fluke. That I
might be re-using someone else's address is quite plausible; "katoo" is
a very common Japanese name, and quite likely to be romanized as "kato"
(as I romanaized "kaato" as "kato").
The program to massage my outgoing mail is working quite well, too,
except for the irritation that my phone will not allow me more than a
30 character Subject header. I've already had to send to a 32-character
e-mail address, so I guess I'm going to have to switch to put the address
I want my mail relayed to in the first line of the message, instead of the
subject line. (Which does at least now allow me to preserve the subject.)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of the laws
of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously injure yourself.
--Dave Barry
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue Jul 24 04:47:28 2001